If you ever needed evidence that New Zealand was coming into its own as a national culture distinct from the Empah, then the current campaign by Coca-Cola brand Lemon & Paeroa—which, once upon a time, was a New Zealand-started and owned drink—is a reminder of earlier times. That time is the 1970s, with L&P’s brown and yellow logo being the height of fashion; people now look back through rose-coloured glasses at summer days from 30 years back, drinking the distinctively Kiwi drink and eating fish and chips.
   Coke has tied in some radio stations into the campaign but it is essentially an evocative one—not unlike Huffer T-shirts from a few years ago that use the 1974 Commonwealth Games’ logo.
   The country is not “all together” yet—race relations aren’t sorted, and the lack of recognition of the Māori language in everyday life is laughable—but it’s an automatic human trait to ignore the worries of the past and remember only the good things. In which case the L&P campaign is a sure winner.
   Never mind that it lacks verisimilitude—the logo in the 1970s had a harsher, egyptian typeface—looking to the past is an easy strategy to take. The campaign itself isn’t innovative—though it attempts to rope together radio and internet and some individual participation (shoot yourself digitally enjoying fish and chips and drinking L&P)—but it is significant from that greater cultural perspective. This is to a Kiwi what an image of a black cab is to a Londoner, and it has not happened in any great way before. It is, of course, aided by the fact that the 1970s can easily be memorialized thanks to colour TV footage—it seems all that more real and close, wide lapels and bad hair aside.
   New Zealand isn’t, after all, just about Hobbits and yachting and the All Blacks. The down side to such campaigns—that New Zealand was a cool and happenin’ place in the 1970s—is that it all too easily trivializes a culture. Posted by Jack Yan, 04:46  permalink

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